What should not be inside an MVC view?

Question

From the limited amount of people that I've talked to regarding MVC web frameworks, I've heard people say that, forgetting about forms, a view file should ideally contain HTML markup, string manipulation and a few for each loops. I've also been told that if statements in views should be avoided if at all possible. Is this generally agreed?

EDIT: The situation that has inspired this question is writing a navigation, I'm finding myself writing:

if secondary_navigation_item has children
    ...

I'm thinking, ideally, does this qualify as logic (that should not be here)?

Answer 1

A view should basically contain:

• HTML Markup
• Javascript
• CSS
• Minimum of server-side code you may need to put into view

So, a View should typically contain the layout elements. The main processing logic should go in Controller.

More Info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model%E2%80%93view%E2%80%93controller

Answer 2

Generally speaking, the View should not contain any server-side business logic. But it can still contain logic that directly pertains to rendering the view.

An example would be a view containing some sort of variant record, whose display depends on the setting of a particular field. For example, a record that displays different information depending on a sex field being set to male or female. Which, of course, would require an if statement.